Opinion of Hamas

[Simfan34]

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Makes as much sense.

[Simfan34]

Say what you want about Israel, it doesn't justify lobbing rockets at towns. If you do that, you're an HP. Not hard.

[Simfan34]

Also, the trope of the "illegitimate settler-state" begs the question of what alternative you would have suggested for the Jews in 1947. Because there clearly was an issue.

[Simfan34]

This is not asking about the relative merits of Israel and Hamas. This is asking about Hamas. Now, obviously there's a reason Hamas exists. And yes, those reasons would be perfectly legitimate grievances with the Israeli policy in regards to the occupation of their country, for the most part, not to mention the continued and largely pointless slaugher of their people.

None of this however justifies Hamas' actions. This really should be straightforward. I didn't want to invoke Godwin's Law with my analogy, but I'll do it anyway in order to be as clear as possible.

Germany was treated extremely unfairly in the Versailles Treaty, this is pretty undeniable. They were assigned blame for a war they didn't start, saddled with crushing reparation debts, and subjected to the stripping of large portions of their territory. Would the German people have had legitimate grievances with these actions? Of course. Were the Nazis responding to these legitimate grievances? Yes. But no one is going to say this somehow justified what they did.

Likewise, just because the Palestinians have perfectly valid problems with Israel does not render Hamas' terrorism against innocent civilians morally excusable. You can bluster about the equivalence of Israeli actions as much as you like, and that's a discussion that could be worth having, but it's not the issue at hand. The fact is that Hamas has consistently targeted civilians- and not, most of the time, military or even economic targets- for no other reason than to kill and frighten civilians. Maybe this might be your idea of heroic resistance to oppression,  but if it is I'd say your moral compass is damn well broken.

[Simfan34]

You're missing the point. I'm not saying that Hamas is as morally depraved as the Nazis were, I'm pointing out that the existence of legitimate points of contention does not bestow upon any group- not Hamas, the Israelis, the Nazis, the NAACP, Boko Haram, the ANC, the Khmer Rouge, the Tutsis, not anyone- some sort of moral carte blanche to commit all sorts of atrocities in an attempt to redress these issues.

Nor does the mere existence of a "viewpoint" necessarily render that view inherently worthy of consideration, for that matter. Even the most mentally deranged killers- the Son of Sam comes to mind- are able to produce some reason as to why they committed their crimes; no one is going to contend that they would bear any less responsible for what they did simply because they were able to come up with an explanation.

I'll invoke Godwin's law again and point out that the Nazis had the perfectly reasonable goal of "punishing and eliminating the traitorous and disloyal elements in German society", at least when you put it in those terms.

The Interahamwe sought to permanently free an subjugated native population from what they saw as the oppression of privileged foreign conquerors whose domination was perpetuated and invigorated by the rule of European colonisers with whom they collaborated in the oppression of the majority population.

Boko Haram, meanwhile, is trying to rid Northern Nigeria of corruption, cronyism, youth disenfranchisement, state-sanctioned discrimination, chronic unemployment, the ascendancy of southerners in their "resource control hats", combining political power with petrodollars, at the expense of the resource-poor north, whilst bringing back a sense of moral order and piety to a disordered and marginalised region of the country.

The mere existence of a rationalisation changes absolutely nothing. It's such a moot point I'm surprised that even you would bring it up.

And again the point of the proportion of casualties is irrelevant to the matter at hand. If you want to discuss the moral or rational justification (or lack thereof) for what the Israeli government is doing, you can go do that. But that is not the question here, now is it? The question is about Hamas.

[Simfan34]

Wrong thread?